Re: P1788: Our first formal motion has entered its discussion period

[Sylvain Pion <Sylvain.Pion@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I have one more point which I think has not been raised yet.

I think the notation we adopt should be "Unicode-friendly".

The current proposal refers to LaTeX, but it would be nice to make sure
that all symbols used are part of Unicode, so that at some point we can
make use of them, e.g. on web pages, or in programs (for those languages
which support Unicode symbols), etc.  Unicode is also an international standard,
unlike LaTeX.  It's not that they all have to be right now part of Unicode,
but we should avoid useless discrepancies if they can be avoided, and if
we choose a symbol which is not in Unicode right now, it would be nice
to make sure it is considered by Unicode for integration in the future.

Some links :

"Unicode Entity Codes for Math" lists the basic set of current math symbols:
http://tlt.its.psu.edu/suggestions/international/bylanguage/mathchart.html

Browsing through the proposal, I only spotted the following three symbols
which are missing :

\mathbb{I} and \mathbb{K}

These are not in the basic list, but it seems that there are some extensions
that support it:
http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/1d540/index.htm
I am not sure about their standardization status (it looks like they are part
of some more recent Unicode version).  They are probably less commonly
available than the others for now, but it seems a safe bet for the future
to use them.

There is also the square used for the interval hull, which is not in the
the Unicode math symbols list, but can be found in "geometric shapes":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_Geometric_Shapes

So, overall, the proposal seems OK on this aspect.
Nevertheless, I wanted to raise this point now, so that this is not forgotten
if new symbols get added to the proposal later in the process.

--
Sylvain Pion
INRIA Sophia-Antipolis
Geometrica Project-Team
CGAL, http://cgal.org/

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